Chinese Miners Announce Accelerated Development and Activation of Segwit2x

A new agreement has been struck among Chinese Bitcoin exchanges and mining companies representing the majority of Bitcoin’s hashing power. They agree to accelerate the development and activation of the Segwit2x scaling upgrade.

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Miners Supporting Segwit2x

Segwit2x, also known as the New York Agreement, is an industry-wide compromise that CEO and founder of Digital Currency Group Barry Silbert spearheaded in May to activate the Segregated Witness (Segwit) scaling upgrade for Bitcoin. The plan instantly gained popularity among a large group of Bitcoin miners and many businesses globally. On Saturday, June 17, Silbert tweeted:

Chinese miners representing over 80% of Bitcoin network hash rate have reconfirmed their support for Segwit2x.

The confirmation stems from an announcement made on Thursday by a coalition of Bitcoin miners and exchanges known as the Chinese Bitcoin roundtable.

Testing Starts Immediately, Signalling Starts Monday

The group held a meeting during the Global Blockchain Summit, which took place on June 14 and 15 in Chengdu, China. They reaffirmed their support for Segwit2x and agreed to a new schedule to test and roll out Segwit2x ahead of the competing BIP148 launch date of August 1.

According to Twitter user Cnledger, the mining pools and exchanges that agreed to the aforementioned plan include Bitmain’s Antpool, Btc.top, Bixin, Btcc Pool, F2pool, Huobi, Okcoin, Viabtc, BW, 1Hash, Canoe, Batpool, and Bitkan. The group said (loosely translated):

In order to effectively solve the problem of Bitcoin network congestion, we will accelerate the development of the Bitcoin scaling solution and promote the sustained, healthy and stable development of Bitcoin.

“We will immediately start the New York consensus Segwit2x program btc1 software test and join testnet5,” they further conveyed. “We will on Monday (June 19) begin to vote to support Segwit2x program,” the group proclaimed. “In order to avoid using the BIP9 vote to influence the official voting results, we will write the “NYA” mark in Coinbase, on behalf of the vote to support the New York consensus Segwit2x program.”

With the goal to release an “official version as soon as possible,” the group reiterated:

We are eager to activate the New York Consensus Segwit2x program by July 31st.

Wu’s Plan to Prevent BIP148

The event and announcement closely follow Bitmain’s release of its hard fork protection plan against UASF BIP148, which CEO Jihan Wu has described as an attack on Bitcoin. He spoke at the Summit on June 14 about how to prevent BIP148 from activating, outlining its weaknesses.

The Need for Fast Action

Many miners attending the summit feel that the Bitcoin “Core” developers did not honor a promise made in February 2016, at the Hong Kong Consensus event, to hard fork the Bitcoin blockchain and raise the block size limit to 2 megabytes. Enabling Segwit2x would fulfill the 2-year-old promise.